This invention relates to the monitoring of oil field recovery processes. More specifically, this invention relates to utilizing the stimulation of specific resident microorganisms through the injection of nutrients in oil field reservoirs to monitor the movement and flow patterns of natural or injected fluids in producing oil field reservoirs and possible connections thereof. The technique is beneficial in the optimization of oil field operations, especially oil recovery projects.
An area of oil field technology is designed to monitor the direction, pattern and rate of fluid movement in a producing oil field reservoir as part of the oil recovery process. Today the industry monitors fluid flow in reservoirs through the use of chemical or radioactive tracers and requires the compositional analysis of produced fluids with tracer concentrations in the range of parts per million or even parts per billion. Due to the very low concentrations of such tracers the result of measurement creates uncertainty if no tracer material is found to be present in the produced water. To increase the concentration is typically cost prohibitive. The use of resident microorganisms stimulated by a source of nutrients injected into the reservoir is discernible with microbiological laboratory techniques even in distant locations. The outcome is a unique biological, organic method to monitor the flow of injected fluids in an oil reservoir.
Therefore, for the reasons stated above, and for other reasons stated below, which will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon reading and understanding the specification, and the drawings, there is a need in the art for a method of monitoring the flow of natural or injected water during oil field recovery processes using an organic tracer.
Thus, it is a primary object of the invention to provide a method of monitoring the flow of natural or injected water during oil field recovery processes using an organic tracer that improves upon the state of the art.
Another objective of the present invention is to provide a method that uses microbiological stimulation of resident microbes as a way to trace fluid movement in a reservoir.
A further objective of the present invention is to provide a method of tracing fluid movement in a reservoir that is more cost effective.
A still further objective of the present invention is to provide a method of tracing fluid movement in a reservoir that is effective at distant locations from the point of injection.
These and other objectives will be apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art based upon the following written description.